This disclosure relates to document access and management. Specifically, this disclosure relates to a trust-model for document access management based on social networks.
Most document access systems are based on a rigid or inflexible structure. To provide access to a document, an owner or creator is required to explicitly state who can access the document. Examples of these conventional systems are the current implementation of DocuShare and Abode Policy Server.
While this rigid structure is ideal for highly confidential documents, it may not be useful for documents that require a certain security level but would also benefit from more access flexibility. For example, the documented results of an initial brainstorming session may require a certain degree of security, however the recipients of the document may want to forward the document to others for their views and ideas, without getting the explicit authorization from the owner of the document.
The use of social networks for information technology has received significant attention in the last few years. Microsoft Research developed SNARF (see “The Social Network and Relationship Finder: Social Sorting for Email Triage”. Carman Neustaedter, A. J. Bernheim Brush, Marc A. Smith, Danyel Fisher. CEAS 2005; and “SNARF Makes Social Sense of E-Mail” by Susan Kuchinskas. InternetNews. Dec. 1, 2005) which is an email application that data-mines social network information present on email traffic to inform the users which are the most important or urgent emails. The Microsoft application is targeted to acquaintances that are one-hop away.
Researchers at the University of Maryland provided a social network solution (see “Inferring Trust Relationships in Web-Based Social Networks”. Jennifer Golbeck, James Hendler. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology.) which uses trust on social network connections to provide information of incoming emails from people not directly connected to the original sender of an email.
Along the same line of work, other social networking sites (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites) provide users with “closeness” information about people willing to connect with them as friends.
One common characteristic of conventional social networks for information technology is to attach social information to arriving documents in order to inform the recipient about the trustworthiness of a particular document. Some examples of this include providing users with tags expressing their interests and subsequently running algorithms to connect users with similar interests (see U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,308, entitled “SYSTEM, METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONNECTING USERS IN AN ONLINE COMPUTER SYSTEM BASED ON THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN SOCIAL NETWORKS”; U.S. Pat. No. 7,016,307, entitled “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR FINDING RELATED NODES IN A SOCIAL NETWORK”; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,594,673, entitled “VISUALIZATIONS FOR COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION”).
This disclosure provides a less rigid approach to a security level associated with a document by leveraging the connections of individuals in a social network. This approach allows a more flexible access structure for documents which are not considered highly confidential, but may require a lesser degree of security.
According to one aspect of this disclosure, social information is attached to departing-documents in order to indicate who can access the document. This is in contrast to conventional systems which attach social information to arriving documents to inform the recipient about the trustworthiness of the document.